Insomnia, My Old Friend

Although I've always had occasional insomnia, it's been more of a problem recently. Usually, the source of my insomnia is straight-forward: too much caffeine too late in the day, or a late nap that disrupts my sleep schedule. What's unusual about my recent bout of insomnia is that it has directly resulted from my attempt to establish a sleep schedule. By trying to sleep properly, I've actually managed to mess up the dysfunctional schedule I had before.

I haven't had a regular sleep schedule for years. Starting in about 10th grade, I've had more of a cycle than a schedule. I'm naturally inclined to stay up late, but when I had school I had to get up at 7 am on weekdays. Instead of falling asleep at 10 pm and getting sufficient sleep, I would steadily deprive myself of sleep until I was too tired to stay up late, when I would go to bed between 9 and 10 pm, restarting the cycle. I couldn't catch up on my sleep on weekends because I would usually stay up even later and be woken up around 9 am. In summer, I had no weekday restriction on the time I woke up, so I would go to bed any time from 10 pm to 4 am and wake up between 9 am and 3 pm, with no real routine.

Although I wouldn't say that my sleep cycle has been beneficial, it's how I've lived for the past five years, so I must have managed somehow. In high school, I only rarely dozed off in classes, although probably more often than people who managed their sleep habits better. At university, I'm more likely to skip classes than sleep through them, although last year I fell asleep often in phys chem, as it was between organic chem and poli sci. Thankfully, not sleeping regularly hasn't severely affected my life thus far, as I've been happy and done well in school.

At times, I would attempt to fix my sleep schedule by going to bed early each night, but I was never committed enough to actually fall into a routine. Going to bed early might have worked in high school, when I was waking up at 7 am five days a week, but we'll never know whether it would have worked had I seriously tried it. My attempts at university all ended quickly, because I didn't have much of a routine to build off of. One night I would go to bed early and wake up early, while the next night I would go to bed early and wake up late, and on the weekends I would stay up and get up quite late, so there was little chance at my routinely going to bed and waking up early.

My latest attempt at establishing a good routine failed disastrously, but provided some insight into why all of my attempts have failed. At the beginning of the exam period, I decided that I would start going to bed at 10 pm each night and waking up when I felt rested. I reasoned that if I get enough sleep and go to bed at the same time, I'll eventually fall into a natural schedule. Unfortunately, it turns out that if I'm getting too much sleep, I won't be unable to fall asleep at night. Even if I go to bed at 10 pm every day, I won't wake up at 8 am if I fall asleep at 2 am, I'll wake up at 12 pm. Having to wake up for 8:30 am exams has even destroyed the cycle of deprivation and recovery I had before, with a chaotic system of recovering between exams and depriving myself of sleep before them.

That being said, I'm not particularly bothered by insomnia. So long as I've been getting sufficient sleep beforehand, I can lose sleep the night before an exam and still be alert. I've had insomnia often enough to know roughly when I should try and sleep and when I should do other activities until I'm more tired, so it's not like I'm wasting hours upon hours tossing and turning in bed. And most importantly, I know that my recent insomnia is temporary, and that once I've flown home for Christmas I can try sleeping regularly again. Next time around I'll know that waking up early is just as important as going to bed early, and if I don't succeed, at least I won't have to write exams and attend class.

Charts I Heart, Part II

Since I wrote about a graph of baby names yesterday, I decided I had to write about this graph, because it is amazing and awesome. In case you don't read French micro-script, it's a graph showing Napoleon's army size during his Russian Campaign, as he advances on Moscow and then retreats. The numbers on this image are tiny, but a larger version shows that Napoleon left with 422,000 troops and returned with 10,000. The bottom of the graph shows the temperature at various part of the return. If a picture's usually worth a 1000 words, this graph is more like 10,000 words, or at least a textbook chapter. For instance, you can quickly see that Napoleon had lost 275,000 troops before even reaching Moscow, and that he lost a further 140,000 on the return home. There's simply a staggering amount of information contained in this graph, which is why I find it fascinating and had to share it.

Blog to the Future!

Now with -100% more Michael Fox.

Some of you may be wondering what the fate of this blog will be. Others may simply have concluded that it's dead, considering that I post less than once a month, on average. It certainly has declined precipitously in the past, from the golden age of posts about Middle Eastern politics and Vegetarianism, to the decadent decline of writing about math and dogs, and finally the stagnation of examining baby names.

I've occasionally been giving some thought to what I want to do with the damn thing. I'm loathe to officially declare it dead and never write again. I like pretending to have serious analytical skills and to pontificate about all kinds of complex phenomena, but I also like to babble on about charts and the optimal size of dogs. The problem is mostly that I don't know which I prefer, and writing about both leads to failure at both. The Expert Weblogger-Analyst tends to be embarassed by the irreverent posts, while the Silly Blogger dislikes all the half-researched, half-assed, too-serious posts.

One thing I can say for certain is that I will not try to write about myself. As an analytical person, I also analyze my own thoughts and behaviour. So long as I don't think too hard about the fact that I am meta-analyzing, it works ok. I come up with some vague ideas about myself, and it's all good. When I try to condense my notions into words I can shove down some intertubes, I get a headache. In other words: when my brain tries to come to a conclusion on my brain based on some brain observations my brain made, it breaks, and my head starts to hurt. I've foolishly attempted this a few times, and each time I walk away from my computer in (mild) pain and frustration. So, I can rule that topic out.

What will I be writing about? I've half a notion to separate this one web-log into the "Oliver values his opinions too highly" blog and the "Oliver's opinions are silly" blog. This could be the first step down a slippery slope, however, into a neverending mitosis of blogs that will eventually consume the internet. (Mitosis is cellular division where one cell splits into two copies.) A few days later I'll further subdivide my blog into "Oliver's Seriously Overinflated Opinions", "Oliver Hazards a Guess at Complex Topics Beyond his Comprehension", "Oliver Gets Drunk and Writes Blog Posts" and "Oliver Writes About Celebrities." Before you know it, I've created 10 million blogs and Google revokes my blogging license.

In all seriousness, I do have a plan for the future of this blog. For the next while, I'll be going through the archives and rewriting or removing my older, poor-quality posts. When I'm happy with everything I've written, and I will leave silly posts that have some point, I'll decide what I'm going to do in future. For now, hopefully you'll appreciate the fact that I'm writing again.

Names

I found an interactive chart that lets you see how a given name has changed in popularity over time. Apparently Oliver shot up in popularity around the year that I was born, so I guess my mom started a trend. Or at least followed a nascent one. Interestingly, although I've only ever met one Oscar in my entire life, compared to five Olivers within recent memory, Oscar's a more popular name. That may explain why people often think my name is Oscar, but I still think that's weird.

The other interesting trend is that the popularity of most of the traditional names like "John", "Charles", "Mary", or "Helen" has tanked over the past century. Although declining relatively constantly, they drop considerably at the same time that "Oliver" and other crazy names like "Isabel" and "Faith" become popular. Well, more popular. What was going on circa 1990 that made traditional names so boring?

I also like the names that spike in popularity and then die down. "Lisa" spiked at the beginning or WWII, peaked in the 60s, and hit bottom when the Simpsons came out. This crazy behaviour probably has to do with the fact that Elizabeth is a solidly popular name, whereas Lisa is a derived name that can become trendy and unfashionable quickly.

To wrap things up, I find charts way too interesting. It's just unreasonable.

An Even Worse Better Deal!

Woohoo, the bill passed!

Yesterday, I gave you two posts for the price of one, if you ignore the fact that posts don't have a well-defined price. Well, today I'm lowering the bar upping the ante: three posts for the price of two!

The U.S. and Canadian Election Debates
This post is really about the Canadian election, so it doesn't count as a U.S. election post, and I haven't broken my promise to only write about the U.S. election once, unlike our Prime Minister who broke his fixed election date promise (to reference Dr. Horrible, "[Stephen Harper] corporate tool.")

The first debate I watched was the Obama-McCain debate, which was pretty funny, but only because we had to take a sip of beer every time someone said something stupid, and I drank four beers over the course of the debate. The second debate I watched was Biden-Palin, which was interesting at first, but soured pretty quickly. The last debate, which I finished watching at 1:30 AM, was the Canadian English Language Debate. For those who are not Canadian, you may know that we have two official languages, and therefore two debates. We also run our elections in 6 weeks, unlike the two-year-long put-me-in-a-come-till-it's-over-I-can't-TAKE-IT-ANYMORE marathon of hot air, posturing, and electioneering that the U.S. has.

There is really a stark contrast between the U.S. debates and the Canadian ones. For one thing, you only have two parties, so it's more adversarial and rhetorical in nature. We have five parties, so although it's confrontational, the targets keep shifting, and policies play a larger role. Watching the ObCain debates, I was laughing at the ridiculous things each side was saying, with McCain saying most of them ("I'm a maverick! A maverick, y'hear! And don't forget it!"), but watching the BidPal debates left my pessimistic and jaded. Obama and McCain liked to throw out soundbites and attack each other, but they at least paid lip service to ides about competing policies, but Biden and Palin left policy at the door. They were both constantly posturing, pretending to respect their opponents while misrepresenting and attacking them, and it was sad to behold.

I'll admit that I'm a little biased in that I'm proud of our Canadian government when compared with the U.S. one. Compared to Bush, Harper looks like another Lincoln or FDR. But I honestly believe that democracy is considerably stronger in Canada than in the States. There was rhetoric and there were lies, but the focus was on policy and competence, not on photogenics. I was actually interested while watching it because I got to see each party present and defend their policy, and although a lot of it is campaign promises, the policies were generally good.

I'm going to discuss the policies that were mentioned, so if you're not interested in Canadian politics, you probably don't want to read further. (Which leaves me with Sherwood and Isabel, maybe.) I'm going to tackle the issues party by party, starting with the one I thought did the best and ending with my least favourite.

1st - The Green Party of Canada, led by Elizabeth May: obviously, they're Canada's environmentalist party, and although they argue that they're not on the left/right spectrum but are rather advocates for the environment, they're pretty solidly progressive. I agree wholeheartedly with a great many of their policies, but am rather put off by their economic policy. Although there's an environmental argument to focus on producing locally, they take things to far and seem to be advocating protectionism. Now, I'm not a zealous free-tradist, as I think protectionism in the developing world is often justified, especially in capital markets, but protectionism in the developed world for populist reasons is simply inexcusable. All in all, I don't think the Green's economic policies are all that great, but they're the most likely to confront global issues like poverty and the environment, so they'd get my vote in theory. It's not very likely, but I really hope the Greens win a seat and start to play a larger role in government.

2nd - The New Democratic Party, led by Jack Layton: he was pretty amusing in the debate, as he had the best jabs and argued more passionately than others. The NDP is Canada's leftist party, (although if you consider environmentalism leftist, then it's more complicated), and they're the party that brough nationalized healthcare to Canada, which we generally consider a Good Move. And indeed, their social and economic policies have the greatest appeal to me, although I don't universally approve of them. For one thing, although both the Liberals and Greens have a green tax-shifting policy, the NDP does not, and generally isn't as concerned about the environment as social problems. However, I quite like their social justice problems, and was impressed that Layton brought up the social problems of the Natives. It's a close call between the Greens and NDP, but I'm not voting for either so the call is pretty arbitrary (shock horror! Not voting for my favourite party? Don't worry, all will be explained below.)

3rd - The Liberal Party, led by Stephane Dion: If you'd asked me a few months ago what I thought of the Liberal party, I'd probably have ranked them barely above the Conservatives (spoiler: they're at the bottom by a lot), and yet they're pretty close to the Greens and NDP. The Liberals are Canada's left-of-centre party, so as a fairly progressive person, there's a lot about the Liberals that I find objectionable. I wasn't really paying attention at the time, but I found the Liberal government under Paul Martin pretty lacklustre and incompetent. Under the Conservative government, I was really frustrated by their willingness to tacitly cooperate with the Conservatives, as Stephane Dion instructed his MPs not to vote on key issues. So far as I was concerned, the sooner the Conservatives were brought down, the better. On the other hand, it's possible that if they pulled down the minority government, voters would have been angry and voted in a Conservative majority, in which case I'd probably move to the States (not really.)

My opinion of them started to change when I read a pamphlet about "The Green Shift." It's a pretty clever plan to reduce carbon emissions by taxing fossil fuels, especially diesel and coal but not gasoline, which is already taxed, while simultaneously cutting income and corporate taxes. I'd prefer if corporations weren't getting a tax cut, but the policy is supposed to benefit low and middle-income families and small businesses much more than the rich and corporations. A key part of the plan is that it will be completely revenue-neutral, which will be enforced by Canada's Auditor General, an independent position with oversight over government spending. Their other policies are generally good, but too centrist for my liking.

However, I will be voting for the Liberal candidate in my riding. Obviously, this isn't my ideal choice, but there are other considerations that change my vote. I have a fairly low opinion of the Liberal candidate, who sold out the environment when she was Ministry of [the Environment] (it's actually Land, Water, and Air or something) in B.C. to corporate interests. But Oliver!?[2] you're an environmentalist! How could you contemplate such a thing as voting for her? I'm not voting for her, I'm voting for the Liberal Party and against the Conservatives. Honestly, I'd be happier if the Conservative candidate were running for the Liberals, as she's a UBC professor of business, so probably pretty smart. I like the Green Shift plan, and voting for the Liberals is the only way to have it enacted, and I strongly dislike the Conservatives (I reserve my hate for certain Republicans), and I would despair if the Conservatives earned a majority. The riding I'm in is pretty contested (the Liberal candidate won it by 153 votes in the last election), so ultimately I've decided to vote against the Conservatives.

4th: the Bloc Quebecois, led by Gilles Duceppe: the Bloc Quebecois are a federalist party representing Quebec's interests in government, but their relevance in recent years has declined since the heyday of Quebecois separatism. Duceppe himself acknowledges he won't be Prime Minister, and he's only there to represent the Quebecois.

5th: the Conservatives: I'm getting really tired of writing by now. I generally dislike the Conservatives' social and economic policies, and I find they tend to have less scruples than other parties (ironic considering how much they emphasize 'values.'), but at least their policies have a principle behind them that I can sort of respect. I have no respect what-so-fucking-ever for their environmental or corporate policies, and I think they're fucking Canada over, so fuck 'em. Worst case scenario: Conservative government and another ~4 years of bullshit, inaction, and screwing over Nature.